China censored the Internet so hard it broke for half a billion users

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China’s government does its best to control what citizens can look at on the Internet. Days ago, someone threw a wrench into the works and broke the Internet for around 500 million users.

What happened? It appears as though someone who was updating the Great Firewall’s configuration meant to add a couple of IP addresses to a blacklist. Instead of preventing any traffic from going to those IPs, however, the GFW started routing all of China’s Internet traffic to them. The result was a sort of mash-up between a DDoS attack and DNS hijacking.

While a simple configuration gaffe seems like a very plausible explanation, China’s state-sponsored news agency Xianhua quickly put forward the theory that it was actually caused by hackers. Who would do such a thing? Falun Gong sympathizers? The NSA? Possibly, but the China Internet Network Information Centre had another explanation: a “root server for top-level domain names” had failed.

That sounds an awful lot like a fancy way of saying something in the censorship system broke. Greatfire.org (a site that monitors the Firewall and Chinese censorship from the outside) is convinced that’s exactly what happened.

The problem with the Firewall had been fixed within just 24 minutes and China’s net users were back to surfing normally within another 20 — once local ISPs had flushed their DNS caches. And while it would be hilarious to think that roughly half of the errant Internet traffic was piped directly into a house in Cheyenne, Wyoming, as reported by some blogs… that’s not the case. It turns out the house was merely an address registered to a Wyoming business that set up stateside paper corporations.